Are you ready, London? Are you ready to start a revolution?
Are you ready to change history? – Madonna
“Feed the World”
The role of celebrities as entertainers, image makers and icons is ready to be made use of should opportunities arise. When necessary, the good-will and compassion of the people with disposable income and an awakening conscience can move mountains. This show of “people power” is, however, consistently diverted towards short-termism with predictable alacrity, tied as it is, to a financial system that is grossly unjust.
Take the role of the media and celebrity-fest surrounding the Live Aid world-wide concert in 1984 and the Live 8 concert which followed in 2005. We will take some time to look at this event that serves as an actual and symbolic rendering of how our subjectivity is used against us all and directly parallels the issues in sexual abuse and exploitation.
Coinciding with the Live 8 concert was the annual G8 Summit hosted by the UK. The G8 is comprised of the world’s leading industrialised nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United States and Russia). On the Live 8 website we can read:
These concerts are the start point for The Long Walk To Justice, the one way we can all make our voices heard in unison. This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 an end to poverty. The G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history. They will only have the will to do so if tens of thousands of people show them that enough is enough. By doubling aid, fully cancelling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children.1
Despite having no rules governing its own operations, no formal or legal powers and no mechanisms of accountability, the G8 wields huge economic, military and diplomatic power in the institutions of global governance. These institutions include the UN Security Council, World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. They are products of a system that is the antithesis of decentralization.
The driving force of these institutions is to achieve new market access for their members. As one aid expert stated regarding Geldof’s initial Live Aid: “...every seasoned aid worker knew then, and knows now, that there is no necessary connection between raising money for a good cause and that money being well spent, just as there is no necessary connection between caring about the suffering of others and understanding the nature or cause of that suffering.”2 This applies as much to ourselves as it does to the world at large. “Understanding the true nature and cause of that suffering.” The unpalatable truth is that G8 leaders have neither the inclination nor the desire to alter history unless it benefits their own particular requirements.
These concerts illustrated the well-spring of genuine empathy and compassion which was allowed to be cynically used and exploited via the egos and subjective fantasies of a collection of celebrities. It showed only too clearly how predisposed entertainers are to their own self-adoration. It was a perfect opportunity for politicians to get in on the act and smile for the cameras while the feckless media sung along. The facts are rather different to the sophistry and rhetoric heard so often from the likes of Bono and Geldof. Their own positions of influence are conveniently used to promote an agenda diametrically opposed to their own wishes to cancel debt and end poverty in Africa. One has to ask why, eleven years later, did we need another Live Aid? And why did all those in the G8 for whom the suffering of millions have never made the slightest impression, suddenly grow a conscience? They doffed their hats to Sir Bob because it served their interests very well indeed.
At the time of writing, not one month after the Live 8 concert, the reality has already descended one again. So, let us look at the small print under this much touted “$55bn Africa debt deal ‘a victory for millions’ ” splashed across the front page of the Observer in June 12 2005 and where Sir Bob Geldof’s rhetoric reached epic proportions with: “Tomorrow 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny…”
Firstly, the G8 proposals for HIPC debt cancellation were already inadequate based on debt relief that will be granted to poor countries “…only if they are shown to be “adjusting their gross assistance flows by the amount given.” in other words, their aid will be reduced by the same amount as the debt relief, thus gaining nothing. Paragraph two states that “it is essential” that poor countries “boost private sector development” and ensure “the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign”.3 So, there we see the real reasons for the winks and smiles.
Let us not forget that debt payments have risen in 2006 and will more than double by 2015. This alone dilutes the aforementioned “victory”. It is also the height of hypocrisy in that while Bono, Geldof and other entertainers were wooing G8 leaders, British arms sales to Africa had reached £1bn a month before the concert and show no signs of slowing.4 This underlined the hollow nature of the event and the truth behind African poverty and debt. The hypocrisy is also underscored by Bono’s penchant for shifting his assets to offshore tax havens and investing in the very corporate franchaises that he is telling us have to be reformed.5
The very foundation of Africa’s wealth and resources are largely in the hands of corporate profiteers under the traditional directives of the G8 membership. The men in suits and soppy grins are the brokers and beneficiaries of this appalling suffering which continues under the euphemism of an “African Union.” This was signed into effect on July 11, 2000, by the 53 nations of Africa. Like the European Union, it has only one peacekeeping force, one Central Bank, one Court of Justice, one currency, and so forth. Essentially, it is a blueprint for control that affords very little rights to Africans by promoting civil war and corruption form which the West can profit. They do this by keeping a cap on any independent development that might eclipse western interests.
Immediately after the Gleneagles meeting had wound down and G8 leaders had been chauffeured away to their sumptuous hotels, the Belgian government was already hatching plans to give lenders greater control over poor countries and reneging on agreements to write off 100 percent of their debt. Belgian IMF representative Willy Kierkens is quoted in a document leaked to the activist group Jubilee Debt Campaign to an address to the IMF executive board that “rather than giving full, irrevocable and unconditional debt relief... countries would receive grants.” 6
Tony Blair lied yet again, though we should not be so surprised after his criminal behaviour on Iraq. The UK Prime Minister stated that the agreed upon total of $48bn a year of aid by 2010 would also include a 100 percent cancellation of multilateral debts of the most indebted countries. Yet Gordon Brown brazenly claimed in a Treasury Committee that this aid increase includes money put aside for debt relief. G8 member countries have shown that their signatures are nothing more than a false appeasement. 7 An activist from the debt relief group: Making Poverty History argued that there existed the same old spin doctors doing what Alistair Campbell did so ruthlessly when covering up for Blair’s lies in the Downing Street Memos: 8 “‘Our real demands on trade, aid and debt, and our criticisms of UK government policy in developing countries have been consistently swallowed up by white bands, celebrity “luvvies” and praise upon praise for Blair and Brown.” 9
Yet MPH is not the only one to be absorbed by the new politics masquerading as New Labour - the new evangelism of the US. It is this New Wave that is shackling African Countries into the false economy of the African Union and the realization that any allotted money can only be accessed if they sign up to World Bank/IMF economic policy conditions.
While Blair was busy jumping aboard the Make Poverty History train, he knew all along that the emotional fuel would run out. Why else was he secretly cutting the government’s Africa desk officers and staff at the same time that the Department for International Development was forcing the privatisation of water supply in Ghana for the benefit of British corporations? 10
Amelioration of poverty, disease and significant successes do take place. Yet overall, the dependency and cycle of debt remains. The “support” addresses symptoms which, although worthy, amount to sops and buffers around the primary fences of poverty, prolonged and exacerbated by Western exploitation. This includes massive bias towards privatization which comprises one half of the World Bank expenditure on what it considers worthwhile projects. Worthwhile that is, to its own coffers.
More and more conditions have been added to the initial agreements which were already piecemeal and ineffective. The overriding stipulation surrounding the whole sham of debt relief and Make Poverty History movement was that it be conditional and tied to the original economic structures that created the problems in the first place. Throw as much money as you like at these problems it will not alter the cycle of debt and poverty until the structure is re-evaluated and reformed. Meantime, compassionate peoples are played by seasoned psychopaths for whom getting fat on power and profit at the expense of others is easy. The fact that 7,000 Africans die everyday means nothing. They rely on it to secure their spoils.
There are ample reasons to conclude that Live Aid in 1984 was truly harmful as well as positive in limited terms. Yet what exactly was this outpouring of understandable emotion achieving? Is it the “sensation junkie” syndrome? A compassion that lends wings to long-term action based on objectivity or a deadly compassion that serves to play into the hands of global leaders? “The fact is that Ethiopia remains one of Africa’s poorest countries, and the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is, if anything, worse off today than it was after Live Aid. Geldof himself has been of two minds. He says that Live Aid “created something permanent and self-sustaining” but he has also asked why Africa is getting poorer.” 11
Sir Bob’s famous (though misquoted) outburst of “Give us the fuckin’ money now” is a belief based on compassion certainly, but compassion without understanding the long term consequences of our reality which can and did spell disaster for many Ethiopians. Yes, the Ethopian famine was an objective reality, but the final results of this great resettlement served the G8 powers admirably. As journalist David Rieff stated: “… Dergue's resettlement policy - of moving 600,000 people from the north while enforcing the “villagisation” of three million others - was at least in part a military campaign, masquerading as a humanitarian effort. And it was assisted by western aid money….”
In effect, UN institutions and donor governments helped a totalitarian project kill thousands of people under the pretense of humanitarian assistance, where “…aid to victims was unwittingly transformed into support to their executioners.” 12 According to French NGO Medecin Sans Frontieres 13 the death total from deportation and raids came to as many as the lives that were saved. The result was good PR for G8 leaders and more misery for the poverty-stricken.
So, do nothing? Isn’t the “the positivity of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought?” Geldof has to be commended for his energy, verve and genuine ability to cut through apathy and despair. Yet his passionate comments in a recent report to answer his critics summarises so many whose dynamism and emotional imperative are used against them:
‘Behind all of this bitter carping is the corrosively cynical view that none of this works. That because they, as critics, do nothing, nobody else should even try. Well, they’re wrong. You can alter policy. The individual is not powerless in the face of either political indifference or monstrous human tragedy. Let me say it embarressedly, cornily, almost guiltily. Let me try to say it without sounding like some pious twat. You can change the world. And millions upon millions of you did that this year. This stuff works. Sometimes. 14
He goes on to discuss the dying baby Birhan Woldu the “little scrap of humanity” now a grown women who was saved by the original Live Aid concert 20 years ago… “all of it was worth it for just her. For that single life.” It is hard to disagree isn’t it? In one very real sense he is absolutely right and nothing should prevent such a call to action. But how are we to confront the deeper issues behind this call to action that is “in the box” of a wider, secret control system that demands the cycles of endless Live Aids? That for one life saved, millions of dead will follow due to insistence of a subjective activism that plays into the hands of those several steps ahead.
Perhaps what we are facing in the 21st century is not a call to end third world debt or to demonstrate against any one particular political atrocity, of which there are many. It is to raise our awareness of the fact that the very core actions of our world are purposely and intentionally created by a minority of psychologically deviant persons. Until we grasp that fact, which includes an in depth knowledge of the mechanisms of political ponerology, Geldof’s well meaning, but ultimately naive mission will be co-opted. Contrary to what the musician states, this stuff does not work. It never has. As Lobaczewski states: "even normal people, who condemn this kind of [Pathocracy] along with its ideologies, feel hurt and deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality, when a widely idealized group is exposed as little more than a gang of criminals.” 15
That does not mean we do not defend truth and demonstrate and allow our voices to be heard. The romantic notion of Revolution is just as much an “opiate for the masses” as Religion ever was. This is not a cynical call to confirm apathy, but an alarm call to discern the truth in any given situation. Armed with knowledge we can then begin to see how we are manipulated and thus together “head it off at the pass.” When we are not aware of how very, very deeply Machiavellian the nature of our world really is, then we are often allowing our activism and compassion to be used as something other than what we believed.
Notes
